Unable to search network drives with Lion...

Yeah thats what I do too, I'm doing some tests at the moment. What I do is make sure the NAS has a mounted share (little arrow next to it in sidebar) > cmd/F click on 'shared' then do a search for files known to be on the drives. I'll let you know what happens.

Correct…

You can click the little triangle so that the volumes appear and then double click them all to mount them.

Then you can simply do a command-F and search the shared as you mentioned.

It will find on all shared volumes. Works fine for me.

UmpaEG wrote:

Its an option, but is it what andybc is doing ?

Is there any other way to search just using the finder ?

Just to be clear : my normal setup is three smb-networked computers (2 PCs, one iMAC, with an external drive), each with three drives. When I boot the MAC, the other computers show up as "shared." I can use Finder to look at and/or search the drives, directories, and subdirectories. Command-f works on a drive level to seach an entire drive, but not an entire shared computer. If I boot up another computer on my network, Wifi (I've also got a PC acting as an entertainment center, and Macbook Pro), these too are searchable with Finder in the same manner,

I also have a MAC app called Alfred that works similarly to Spotlight, but can be customized to add drives from networked computers. In this case, I can search my entire iMAC and the networked computer drives selected with one search, without digging down through Finder.

None of the above options were available to me before 10.8.1. As do others in this thread, I used Find Any File to search drives other than the iMac.

It looks like 10.8.2 is taking some steps towards making this work. After I installed 10.8.2 the first time I tested the finder search box against an SMB share (Windows 7 Home Premium) it worked, but after that it stopped working again. This was right after the 10.8.2 reboot.

More testing shows that this seems to be working only sometimes on a fresh connect. I.e. unmount the SMB share, use Command-K to connect to the server again, and in the new finder window that pops up do the search. Once you've succeeded in one search, you need to unmount and remount the share to get the search to work again. This seems to work most of the time, though not consistently. However, this is better than any behavior I've seen since I installes 10.7.

Obviously we can't say that this is fixed, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

I really don't get it how is it possible that such basic and fundamental thing as searching is still not working ? Where should I report it so they finally do they job properly, maybe they are not aware about this problem ?

I wish I had such power 🙂 And no offence taken, but honestly I don't know what to think about it anymore. Searching is like one of most important engines in MacOS, spotlight is build in to many apps including mail etc. (where Apple is so proud about those features). Such issue should be fixed within days and now here we are. Apple has time to deploy new system but can't repair such basic issue? Thats totally unprofessial from my point of view.

I'm mad because pretty soon I want to replace my machine at work and if seraching is still not working under Lion I'll be forced to go with some PC.

So maybe Apple needs to hear more voices from a John Doe like me to put their highest priority about this matter (this is why I asked where to report it)?

Hello Pepa_u et all

If you are still facing issues, I would like to volunteer this information.

Re spotlight index to your local drive

1) Go to the spotlight system preferences and add your internal drive to the privacy tab

2) Now remove it from the privacy tab

-The two steps above causes spotlight to reindex your internal drive, which can help with time machine backups as well because backups rely on the index

Re spotlight index to your shared drives (hanging off extremes, SMB, FTP, AFP…)

1) Go to the spotlight system preferences and add your internal drive to the privacy tab

2) Now remove it from the privacy tab

3) Open terminal and type the command in step 2

4) sudo mdutil -i on path-to-volume (when it comes to the path-to-volume, simply mount your drive, add a space after the command noted here in step 2 followed by dragging and dropping your mounted drive to the terminal window)

3) You need to type in your administrator password, as you type there is no feedback. Press enter after typing your password of course.

In both cases above, if you click on the spotlight icon, you should see indexing going on. Please note, there may be a few seconds delay before you see the index progress bar appear.

If it does not index, repeat steps 1 and 2 for either scenario.

Small caveat:

Since the index is stored locally on your computer's local volume, the drive you are indexing, especially with network drives, the 'server' or remote volume MUST remount with exactly the same name each time or it won't pair up the server/remote volume with the local index.

PS, yes this has absolutely been reported to Apple. If anyone here is still having issues and you believe your issue is better looked at outside this thread I recommend creating a new post with your specific situation. Highlight specific details regarding your OS version, hardware and symptoms and if reproducible, point those out as well.

I hope this helps.

it is not able to index it in a reasonable time!

Pepa_u

A reasonable amount of time is relative. How long have you waited and how much data is spotlight chewing threw?

Without knowing much more than what I quoted above, perhaps leave the mac on all night with only the Finder running.

Regards

LostAccount wrote:

A reasonable amount of time is relative. How long have you waited and how much data is spotlight chewing threw?

Without knowing much more than what I quoted above, perhaps leave the mac on all night with only the Finder running.

Regards

Reasonable amount of time would be lets say a day, but it is not. It crunches for days and does not progress. I left mac running not only one night, but couple of...

LostAccount wrote:

Hello Pepa_u et all

If you are still facing issues, I would like to volunteer this information.

Re spotlight index to your local drive

1) Go to the spotlight system preferences and add your internal drive to the privacy tab

2) Now remove it from the privacy tab

-The two steps above causes spotlight to reindex your internal drive, which can help with time machine backups as well because backups rely on the index

Re spotlight index to your shared drives (hanging off extremes, SMB, FTP, AFP…)

1) Go to the spotlight system preferences and add your internal drive to the privacy tab

2) Now remove it from the privacy tab

3) Open terminal and type the command in step 2

4) sudo mdutil -i on path-to-volume (when it comes to the path-to-volume, simply mount your drive, add a space after the command noted here in step 2 followed by dragging and dropping your mounted drive to the terminal window)

3) You need to type in your administrator password, as you type there is no feedback. Press enter after typing your password of course.

In both cases above, if you click on the spotlight icon, you should see indexing going on. Please note, there may be a few seconds delay before you see the index progress bar appear.

If it does not index, repeat steps 1 and 2 for either scenario.

Small caveat:

Since the index is stored locally on your computer's local volume, the drive you are indexing, especially with network drives, the 'server' or remote volume MUST remount with exactly the same name each time or it won't pair up the server/remote volume with the local index.

PS, yes this has absolutely been reported to Apple. If anyone here is still having issues and you believe your issue is better looked at outside this thread I recommend creating a new post with your specific situation. Highlight specific details regarding your OS version, hardware and symptoms and if reproducible, point those out as well.

I hope this helps.

I all did these steps several times. It does not help.

pepa_u wrote:

It crunches for days and does not progress.

This means mdworker crashes while trying to index the content of a specific file. I bet €10 that it's an Office document. There are hundreds of how-to's on how to deal with this. My personal solution was to get rid of all Microsoft products and use just Apple Soft- and Hardware and Linux. Haven't had any problems since then. Whether this is Apple's or Microsoft's fault, or whether this is intentional, has been discussed in this thread at length. If you want trouble, or you're bored, run Office on a Mac, mount SMB shares on a Mac etc etc ad nauseum. My 2 cent.

No problems searching docs from MS Word:Mac 2011 on my local machine and my local network (MBP, iMac, external drives, airport extreme).

So why won't it do the same search/index in on the smb volumes? ... Back to square 1 ;-)

My 0.01888 CHF ;-)

Well, my new employer does not allow my - or better any - MBP on the MS-based network. So I cannot verify any new hints/suggestions/procedures anymore.

I'm not saying that when spotlight crashes while indexing, it is always because of an Office document. I'm just saying that I regard the probability so high to put a bet on it. If this was percepted as a 100% probabilty then I apologise.

I am afraid I can't tell you why it worked until 10.7.5 was installed nor can I explain why a lot of people are having the same issue after installing 10.7.5. This is why it's always a good idea to backup before any update. In case something goes terribly wrong, you can always revert back from the backup 😀

I recommend you rebuild the spotlight index as per the steps I provided. In your case, it may be enough to simply add your drive to the spotlight privacy tab and a few seconds later remove it, forcing the spotlight index to rebuild itself.

I hope this helps…

It took me years to convince our IT guys to let me run a mac in our office. I was repeatedly told that it would not work with me saying that it would. Alas, my new MBP won't do something as simple as search a network drive. But I did find a solution: Run the search in my virtual windows 7 machine. It works flawlessly. I am starting understand why people are saying that Apple is more worried about ipods than computers.